The Israel Land Authority plans to build 2,300 housing units for Jerusalems Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) population on the historic site of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, which witnessed a massacre in 1948

Monday December 3, 2018, 3:57 pm
The Israel Land Authority (ILA) plans to build 2,300 housing units for Jerusalem’s Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) population on the historic site of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, which witnessed a massacre in 1948.

The ILA’s plan would see an extension of the Har Nof neighbourhood, situated on the western edge of Jerusalem, with 2,300 housing units being built on 648 dunams (162 acres) of land. The land is currently covered by the Jerusalem Forest which, combined with Har Hof and the nearby Givat Sha’ul, sit on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin.

According to Haaretz, the initiative “is still in the preliminary planning stages” but approval of the plans “would be handled by means of the fast-track process that has been put in place to boost [Israel’s] housing inventory [to] counter rising prices”.

An ILA document detailing the plans explained that: “The plan’s major advantage is the fact that the increased [housing] inventory would be created in close proximity to the edge of an existing ultra-Orthodox neighborhood: Har Nof.”

The plans have been vehemently opposed by Israeli environmentalists, but no mention has been made of the location’s historical significance.

Many of Israel’s forests have been built to cover the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed and forcibly depopulated during the Nakba of 1948. According to Zochrot, an Israeli not-for-profit which works to promote awareness of the Nakba, “more than two-thirds of KKL [Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, part of the Jewish National Fund (JNF)] forests and sites – 46 out of 68 – conceal or are located on the ruins of Palestinian villages demolished by Israel”.

The JNF has also claimed ownership of vast swathes of land in order to further dispossess Palestinians. Earlier this week, the JNF secured victory in a 22-year-long legal battle in which it claimed ownership of 522 dunams (130 acres) of land which forms part of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, south east of Bethlehem. Gush Etzion’s illegal settlers claimed the JNF purchased the land from a Palestinian Christian family in 1944, before the Nakba, but Palestinians contradicted this by providing ownership documents for the land. Despite this, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favour of the settlers and the JNF.

Israel has sought to remove any trace of Deir Yassin in order to cover up its massacre of between 100 and 250 Palestinians from the village during the Nakba. On 9 April 1948, 120 members of underground Jewish militias – the Irgun (National Military Organisation) and Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, also known as the Stern Gang) – attacked Deir Yassin, despite the fact that the village had signed a non-aggression pact. Reports of mutilations, rapes and survivors being paraded through Jewish neighbourhoods before being summarily executed, have since emerged, with the massacre becoming one of the most infamous in the history of the Nakba.

What I find interesting about Deir Yassin is that for 70 years people have been using it to demonize Israel while totally ignoring the context in which it occurred.

For the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 the solution to the Palestinian problem seemed perfectly obvious. Just say NO! From their perspective the Jews were not entitled to anything. Compromise was not an option. The UN and the Jews, on the other hand, sought compromise. And on November 29 the UN's compromise was ratified. The UN recommended partitioning Palestine into a large Arab State and a small Jewish State. The Arabs made their choice. No compromise, only violence. They told the UN: "The Palestinian Arabs consider any attempt by Jewish people or by whatever power or group of power to establish a Jewish state in an Arab territory to be an act of aggression that will be resisted by force."

The cycle that violence that ensued, initiated by the Arabs in response to the UN resolution, began with attacks on buses, sniper fire on civilians, bombs and mines. Jewish paramilitary groups retaliated. Then Arab volunteers from various countries began to flow into Palestine and the conflict turned into a full scale civil war. The isolated Kibbutz settlements in the North were under attack, and Jerusalem was completely cut off and remained under siege for nearly six months. The Jews had no choice but to defend themselves. It was a desperate situation and that desparation was reflected in the tactics of some of the Jewish paramilitary groups.

Deir Yassin occurred five months into the war. How many Jews were massacred by Arabs in those five months? How many were women and children? How brutal were their deaths? How many Jews and Arabs died because of the Arab refusal to compromise? People are certain they know every detail of the Deir Yassin incident, but five months of Arab aggression is a total mystery to them, and worse, is of no interest, because all that is important is the demonization of the Jews.

Since 1974 the UN has promoted the idea of establishing a Palestinian State in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. These two disjointed areas don't compare with the area of the State the Palestinian Arabs rejected in 1947. Yet the PLO in 1993, 46 years after rejecting the UN Partition plan, finally declared their readiness to to accept such a compromise. I wonder if the Arab world will ever recognize the tragic error they made by rejecting compromise in 1947. I wonder if they will ever recognize that their rejection of the Partition plan not only caused the Palestinian Arabs to lose most of the State they would have had, and led to the exile of 700,000 refugees, who's descendants today number in the millions, but worst of all cost the lives of thousands of Arabs who fought Israel needlessly.

There are two crucially important things to consider in reference to the massacres at Deir Yassin and the Mosque in Lud.

The first issue is to acknowledge that a tragedy took place. Jewish paramilitary groups killed Arab citizens in a way that was out of proportion to any fighting that may have occurred. So it was a tragedy that any decent person regrets.

But there is a second issue which is equally crucial: to place these tragic incidents in their true historic context.

Between 1920 and 1948, the Palestinian Arabs committed thousands of acts of murder, rape, and robbery against the Jews. They did so at the open urging of their genocidal leader the Mufti. The Jewish community practiced self restraint and did not retaliate in kind. In 1948, this self restraint wore thin and the Jews retaliated by committing a massacre of the kind which had been standard Palestinian behavior for 25 years.

Palestinians use the massacres at Deir Yassin and the Mosque in Lud to imply that the Israelis are inhuman and cruel. That is not a reasonable conclusion. The reasonable conclusion is that after 25 years of being massacred by Palestinians, the Jews retaliated in kind. Its nothing to be proud of, in fact it should be greatly regretted. But the propaganda use of these two massacres against Israel is the ultimate Palestinian hypocrisy.

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